The Annunciation [NOOK Book]

Overview

At the heart of Ellen Gilchrist’s novel is the incorrigible Amanda McCamey. Leaving a troubled past behind, she marries into New Orleans’ high society but finds the privileged world stifling and unsatisfying. Seeking a quieter, more meaningful life, she divorces and moves to the Ozarks where she translates poetry and surrounds herself with artists and intellectuals. Her friend Katie, a brilliant sculptor, brings out the wild child in Amanda, but it is Will, an intense young musician, who captivates her. What ...

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Overview

At the heart of Ellen Gilchrist’s novel is the incorrigible Amanda McCamey. Leaving a troubled past behind, she marries into New Orleans’ high society but finds the privileged world stifling and unsatisfying. Seeking a quieter, more meaningful life, she divorces and moves to the Ozarks where she translates poetry and surrounds herself with artists and intellectuals. Her friend Katie, a brilliant sculptor, brings out the wild child in Amanda, but it is Will, an intense young musician, who captivates her. What begins as a sexual tryst quickly becomes a grand and impossible passion that mirrors the life of the eighteenth-century French poet whose work Amanda is translating. But her new life is interrupted when her past comes back to haunt her. With beauty, humor, and luminescent prose, Gilchrist paints an evocative portrait of a woman finally coming into her own.

Editorial Reviews

Harper's Magazine

Women’s fiction par excellence … Amanda is in some ways a receptacle for current romantic clichés, but she is also a vivid character or dash and humor [who] has at last made her way to autonomy.

Publishers Weekly

Gilchrist's accomplished first novel is absorbing, rich, and evocative as she explores the heart and mind of a woman who has the courage to risk traveling an unconventional path in an effort to find the way to herself.

Southern Scribe Reviews

Ellen Gilchrist's debut novel foreshadows the themes Gilchrist returns to repeatedly throughout her works--growing up, leaving home, falling in and out of love, and trying again. After her youthful indiscretion, Amanda McCamey almost becomes the woman her family expects her to be. She marries New Orleans wealth, joins country clubs, supports the arts, and almost acts like a matron until her restless nature surfaces again. The Annunciation is a memorable, rich, evocative novel.

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Meet the Author

Ellen Gilchrist is the award-winning author of more than 20 books, including novels, short story collections, essays and poetry. Her new collection of stories, ACTS OF GOD, will be published in April 2014 by Algonquin, along with the paperback release of her novel A DANGEROUS AGE. She lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas and Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and teaches creative writing and contemporary fiction at the University of Arkansas.

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Customer Reviews

6889198

Posted September 1, 2011

Incorrect titlle

This title does not downlosd correctly. A Google book with different title downloaded instead of the Gilchrist book.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted December 26, 2000

Discover yourself through Gilchrist's novel

Being the kind of person that is interested in linguistics, this book hit close to home for me since the main character is a translator. The story is about Amanda who deals with emotional insecurity during her childhood and, as a result, has a hard time getting her life back on track. The novel is quite romantic in that she follows her dream as a translator, and defies all boundaries she has created for herself as a young woman. Towards the end of the novel, she is liberated and therefore inspiring to readers of all ages, reinforcing that it is never to late to be who you want to be. I am not a frequent reader but am now hooked to Gilchrist's sometimes frank yet consistently beautiful writing with characters to which a gamut of personalities can relate.

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